Jim Farnum

Jim Farnum was born in Columbus, Ohio in 1950 and moved as an infant to Southern California. An early interest in both wildlife study and art led him to pursue his two loves as he got older. In high school Farnum began what would become a lifelong pursuit, the drawing and painting of wildlife. His paintings of wildlife hang in many private and corporate collections.

He attended the University of California at Berkeley in the School of Forestry with a Wildlife Management major. While at Berkeley, Farnum was enlisted to illustrate many journals and magazines of popular culture. During his years in the Bay Area, Farnum combined his practice of marital arts with fine art and painted a number of large wall murals with martial art themes in Chinese restaurants in Oakland, a few of which survive today. After a many years hiatus from the art world, Farnum was re-invigorated to paint and draw when he was invited to join a group of artists that draw the human figure in Seyburn Zorthian’s Santa Ynez valley studio. While there, he became fascinated with the style and medium of local well-known pastelist, Patricia Hedrick. A Santa Barbara artist, Fran Scorzelli, introduced Farnum to the work of New York pastel and oil artist, Wolf Kahn, and Farnum was immediately taken by Kahn’s use of unusual color schemes in landscape painting. He continues to develop a style that suits him, switching from fauvist to representational landscapes in the search for that style.

Farnum’s four solo exhibits at the Chancellor Galley in Santa Barbara, and the ArtBrut Gallery in Los Alamos have been favorably reviewed in the Santa Barbara press and his attendance in group shows continues to grow. Santa Barbara News Press art critic Benoit Lebourgeois remarked “Farnum’s pastels reflect a personal vision articulated around a desire to escape back, or toward a world of landscapes dominated by striking colors and ambient space.”, and further “The oddly juxtaposed primary colors remain, but now fully in control, they overload our sensations.” Finally, Lebourgeois notes, “Modern art’s essential paradigm-that we invest ourselves into the piece and allow raw emotions to surface-realized its potential in these pastels.” In 2005 he joined the Santa Barbara Studio Artists and currently works and shows from his 100 year old barn, recently converted to a studio. His work has been widely collected by both corporate and individual patrons.